SCIENCE

Acquisition Enhances Portfolio of Productivity Tools and Components for Developers Creating Multi-threaded Applications

Rogue Wave Software has acquired Acumem, a leading vendor of memory optimization products for single and multi-threaded application development. 

Acumem was formed in 2006 to bring to market the innovation developed by Professor Erik Hagersten and his research team at Uppsala University.  Acumem’s patent-pending products help eliminate performance issues by analyzing memory bandwidth and latency, data locality, and thread communications/interaction, to pinpoint performance issues. Unlike traditional profilers that gather data but provide little analysis, Acumem provides specific guidance on performance issues by identifying them, estimating each issue’s importance (and rank ordering them), and guiding the developer to the location in the source code where the issues are located. This enables performance experts to be more productive, while also allowing non-experts to optimize the performance of their code, an exceptionally difficult aspect of parallel development.

“It’s a simple fact that developing parallel, data-intensive applications is hard -- it is Rogue Wave’s mission to make the process easier for our customers,” said Brian Pierce, Rogue Wave’s CEO. “The acquisition of Acumem furthers Rogue Wave’s strategy of bringing together a portfolio of tools and components that reduces the complexity of parallel development. Acumem’s products are easy to use for both performance experts and non-experts alike and create an environment where code optimization, rather than rewriting existing applications, is the shortest path to multicore performance.”

Acumem’s products will now be sold and supported by Rogue Wave’s global sales team and partners. Acumem’s CTO Dr. Erik Hagersten and his entire team will join Rogue Wave’s staff. They will continue to operate in Sweden, further expanding Rogue Wave’s global footprint.

“HPC application developers and users know that introducing more processors and cores doesn’t automatically increase the performance of applications and can sometimes have the opposite effect,” said Steve Conway, Research Vice President, High Performance Computing at IDC. “An IDC study showed that 12% of HPC sites have at least some codes that run more slowly on their newest HPC system than on the smaller, less parallel prior one. And 50% of the sites said they expect to see retrograde performance like this on some codes within a year. Optimizing applications for today's increasingly parallel and heterogeneous HPC systems is a daunting task. Rogue Wave's portfolio of widely used tools and components, including the Acumem addition, are designed to boost the productivity of application developers and their organizations by making this task substantially easier."